More Than a Fifth of Navy Ships Aren’t Ready to Fight

More than a fifth of the Navy isn’t ready to sail or fight, at a time when demand on the fleet is off the charts. And the number of unready ships is likely to rise as Navy officers try to fix their chronic readiness woes.

The Navy’s surface fleet goes into the water banged up. Its aircraft carriers, frigates, destroyers spend nearly 40 percent of their deployment time with “at least one major equipment or systems failure,” according to a chart Forbes released at a hearing on Tuesday. That can include “anti-air defenses, radar, satellite communications, or engines.” Let’s not forget that even the new ships are disintegrating.

At Forbes’ hearing, two senior Navy officers, Vice Adm. William Burke and Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy, signaled that the readiness problem’s going to get worse before it gets better. As engineers perform more detailed inspections — the admirals’ solution to the problem — they’ll probably expose even deeper maintenance woes. And ship maintenance “came up short” in the current defense budget, Burke said, with $5 billion devoted to patching up the fleet.

Now consider that the Navy’s facing down three big trends. The Obama administration’s $400 billion, 12-year defense budget cut means it has to juggle priorities if it wants to get its ships and planes ready to fight. (Bye-bye, super lasers.) The Pentagon sees the U.S.’ most likely security showdowns occurring at sea and in the air, especially in the western Pacific — the Navy’s wheelhouse. Finally, unless the Navy goes on a shipbuilding surge in the next decade, the fleet might shrink by about 70 ships as the Reagan-era subs and combatants meet the end of their service life in the 2020s.

The Navy, in other words, is staring down an era of doing more with less. And the decks it’s looking out from appear increasingly creaky and junked.